About
Our ethos is “Alchemy in Motion.”Studio Kato embraces transformation and the boundless possibilities of cinema, bending worlds and shaping reality until imagination is distilled into experience, and fragments of a life once known become wondrous possibilities.A creative studio founded by filmmaker Kato Alexander, creating original work across live action and animation.Stories invite audiences across a threshold of revelation into worlds that feel limitless yet intimately familiar. Places you’ve only dreamed of, yet somehow always known.Original projects include the award-winning psychological horror thriller HAPPY and PHAAAT FARMA, an adult animated satire currently in development.Work designed to transport, provoke, and expand the boundaries of where a story can take us.
Projects
Animation: Series
PHAAAT FARMA: where everybody wants to be the most sought after drug.In a Hollywood-style pharmacy, where image is everything and survival is a side effect, these medications aren’t just filling prescriptions… They’re chasing fame, and fighting for relevance to the top of a corporate food chain that has a rather unusual definition of ‘healthy competition’. Welcome to PHAAAT FARMA, an adult animated series created by Kato Alexander and Elley-Ray Hennessy. Here celebrity is prescription, desirability is currency, and the business of making people feel better comes with a spectacularly unhealthy dose of ambition. Behind the glossy façade of pharmaceutical glamour lurks a monstrous corporate machine. Where success can be intoxicating, failure can be fatal to your reputation, and nobody is quite as they appear. A darkly comic collision of celebrity culture, corporate excess, and the commercialization of human vulnerability, PHAAAT FARMA asks a deliciously uncomfortable question: In a world where everyone is selling the promise of a better you, what happens when the products themselves become the biggest personalities in the room?It’s all about what you swallow.Created by: Kato Alexander & Elley-Ray Hennessy
Concept Art by: Madison FlanneryFunded by Toronto Arts Council
Live Action: Short Film
HAPPY is a psychological horror thriller short film that pulls audiences into a world where the people closest to you can become your worst nightmare, and you can’t trust your own mind to tell the difference. Jason has spent his life chasing societal ideals and burying his truth to become the man everyone expects him to be. Now, the life he’s built is closing in on him, and the people he cares for are becoming monsters.He can no longer tell which is which.A gripping story full of suspense. Inner voices shatter perception while sanity erodes, plunging audiences into the depths of fear and illusion masked by love. It’s impossible to separate. Written, co-directed, executive produced, and starring Kato Alexander, this psychological horror film puts Black queer love at the centre of a chilling question: What happens when you deny your truth and allow the inner saboteur to take over?Following its recent Cinéfest recognition, HAPPY won Best Horror Film at the 2025 Toronto Short Film Festival and had its US premiere at the 2025 New York City Horror Film Festival.Now streaming on Film Shortage x Youtube.Created by: Kato Alexander
Directed by: Kato Alexander & Renjie Li
Illustration by: Blake EverndenProduced by Renergy House Media in association with Studio Kato.Funded by Canada Council For The Arts
